about

hey, i’m abhay. this is my little digital garden, where i write things down and share cool stuff i come across.

i’m a cs senior at ut dallas, graduating in december 2026. along the way i’ve interned at google (twice) and dell.

how i got into this

in 9th grade i started learning japanese with ajatt: mostly immersion in native content, with software to smooth out the workflow. anki, a spaced-repetition app, was the first tool that got me thinking creatively about software.

the more tools i used, the more the inefficiencies stood out. the worst was turning sentences i’d mined from native content into anki cards, an hour of copy-pasting every day. so i picked up python and hacked together a cli script to do it for me. a few hundred lines of ugly code that saved 365 hours a year. i was hooked.

since then i’ve kept building for language learning: a japanese ocr, an android popup dictionary, a youtube-to-anki add-on, a hardcoded-subtitle blocker, and more. three years after that first script, partly out of nostalgia, i rewrote it as a full rust cli with dozens of features and chinese support.

the motivation hasn’t changed: open-source things that make life easier.

what i nerd out on

i try to balance “useful” projects with “curiosity” ones. that mix is my idea of hacker nirvana (post on it someday).

lately that’s distributed systems and scalable architecture. scaling is a problem every startup hits eventually, and the engineering behind it is really clever. contributing to infrastructure projects like apache flink is a goal of mine.

on the other end is deep learning for nlp and cv. llms are everywhere right now, but turning huge piles of data into useful tools is what gets me, especially where it meets scalable engineering. my ml notes and a starter roadmap live on clovlog.

linux & homelab

i use arch btw. linux changed how i think about computers and made me a lot more productive. day to day it’s hyprland, waybar, neovim, tmux, zsh, alacritty, zen, and obsidian. my dotfiles are up if you’re curious.

my homeserver is a dell poweredge r720 running proxmox: services in lxc containers behind an nginx reverse proxy, pihole, and tailscale for remote access. it doubles as my nas, running truenas with a raid-z2 zfs pool on sas drives. a proper homelab post is coming eventually.

my pc specs

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7800x3d
• Motherboard: ASUS B650-E AM5
• GPU: Nvidia RTX 3090
• RAM: 32GB DDR5
• Monitors: 2x Dell G2724D (2560 x 1440 & 165hz)
• PSU: Corsair RM850e
• Case: Fractal North (wood & mesh)

outside of cs

i studied japanese intensively for about 4 years through high school and got to a pretty high level. in 12th grade i started mandarin with the same ajatt approach, pulled in by the history, culture, literature, and philosophy it opens up.

to avoid getting glued to the chair, i lift and run long distance, and eat a mostly whole-foods, plant-based diet. i really believe your mental state follows your physical one, and you need both to feel whole.

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